• Arrow Buys French Midrange Distributor

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT hardware and software giant Arrow Electronics continues to benefit from the desire by smaller and often regional IT distributors to get out of peddling basic infrastructure and move up the stack to selling solutions. Last week, Arrow increased its presence in Europe, particularly among small and medium businesses, with the acquisition of the Logix subsidiary of Groupe Open. In doing so, Groupe Open will focus on its IT services businesses and leave the value-added reselling and distribution to others. The acquisition of the Logix subsidiary of Groupe Open follows two years of acquisitions by Arrow and its remaining

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• Search Engine Scanning: The System i Wins a Few Deals

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Internet is a wonderful thing in so many ways. One of them is that the Internet is somewhat self-aware, and if you tell it to look for certain patterns, it can find them. I did a trolling through some search engines last week, and ran across a few deals involving the System i that were woven in between all the references to content generated by IT Jungle’s writers. These deals are probably more representative of the kinds of sales that IBM and its business partners do every week than the big deals that make the trade press from time

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• Tango/04 Looks Ahead to 2008 as It Attains Record Results in 2007

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Systems management software maker Tango/04 Computing Group, has spent a lot of time and energy moving beyond its Spanish home market and expanding its product line beyond systems management to broader security auditing and business service management, and that strategy has provided the Barcelona, Spain, company revenue growth and profits for the past several years. And according to Raúl Cristián Aguirre, president and chief executive officer at Tango/04, 2007 was a very good year, indeed. Of course, Tango/04 is a privately held company–and one that has its share of private equity and other companies sniffing around for an acquisition

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• SAP Shows Prototype X64-Linux-ERP Bundles

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In its ongoing effort to attack the midrange market with its ERP software, German software giant SAP was last week showing off a prototype bundle of one of its software stacks riding atop Linux on servers based on Intel‘s X64 Xeon processors. The event for the prototype sneak peek was CeBIT, the annual IT extravaganza–and the largest IT trade show in the world, by the way–which is held in Hannover, Germany. The bundle includes SAP’s Business All-in-One ERP stack, a variant of its flagship mySAP software aimed at midrange companies that are a bit less complex than the multinational

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• AIIM Survey Shows Companies Starting to Wrestle with Document Chaos

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first step toward solving any problem is, as we all know, admitting that there is a problem in the first place. The proliferation of various forms of structured and unstructured information and the persistence of paper-based documents has made a mess of things. But according to a recent survey of companies performed by AIIM, an association of vendors and users in the electronic content management space, companies are finally starting to wake up and smell the ECM software. AIIM used to be known as the Association for Information and Image Management, but has evolved into one of those

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• IBM Slashes Prices on Blade Server I/O Virtualization Software

  March 10, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last fall, IBM announced a new bit of systems software for its BladeCenter blade servers that virtualizes the Ethernet network and Fibre Channel storage area network addressing schemes built into adapter hardware in servers. This software, called Open Fabric Manager, takes hardware virtualization one more necessary step forward. But the software is new and it is not necessarily cheap. And so IBM is testing its pricing with a discount promotion. As I explained last fall when Open Fabric Manager was announced, the software, which runs inside the service processor in the BladeCenter chassis, allows for the hard-coded Media Access Control

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• Q&A with IBM’s Mark Shearer: Still Mister System i

  March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with IBM’s Mark Shearer: Still Mister System i When IBM reorganized its Systems and Technology Group once last July and then again this January, the System i product line seemed to get a bit lost in the shuffle. In July, the System i went from being a division to being a product line split between high-end and low-end divisions, Power Systems and Business Systems, and then in January IBM finished redrawing the organization chart and cut product development and manufacturing from sales and marketing. More than a few people have had the impression that the System i product line

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• Linux and Windows Server Sales Outpace the Market in Q4

  March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it is probably not a big surprise to anyone that revenues for servers running Linux or Windows outpaced the sales of the rest of the market in the final quarter of 2007. In fact, one way of looking at the market statistics just released by analysts at IDC is that Linux and Windows boxes are the main reason why the server market managed to grow revenues by 2.4 percent to $15.7 billion, driven by a 9 percent growth in shipments. However, as a similar modeling of the server market for Q4 and all of 2007 from Gartner reckoned, IDC

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• Infinite Software Partners with HP, Acquires Altos Technology Group

  March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a busy couple of weeks for legacy application rehosting environment provider Infinite Software, which you probably remember by its former name, California Software. Several weeks ago, Infinite Software announced that it had partnered with server and operating system maker Hewlett-Packard in an effort to offer customers with vintage RPG and COBOL applications running on AS/400, iSeries, and System i platforms the option of running that code on HP’s Itanium-based Integrity servers running HP-UX, Windows, or Linux. And last week, Infinite Software, which is based in Laguna Niguel in southern California, announced that it has acquired Altos

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Plane’s Peeking

  March 3, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  In computing, even the industry leaders can get hit with surprises coming from angles they never dreamed of. Sometimes these new ideas substantially change or extend the world of computing. These disruptive developments add new dimensions to information processing. And it’s often very hard for the established leaders to understand what is emerging before their eyes. This is a situation much like the one at the heart of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a short, witty novel about mathematics and Victorian society written by Edwin A. Abbott, a theologian and scholar. Ballmer, Palmisano, and you ought to

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